Philip Müller, creator, maintainer and lead developer of the Manjaro Linux project, announced earlier today, September 12, the immediate availability for download and testing of the first Alpha build of Manjaro Linux Xfce 15.12, despite the fact that Manjaro Linux Xfce 15.09 is still in development.

Manjaro Linux Xfce 15.09 will see a third and last RC (Release Candidate) build next week, and then the final version will be available for users worldwide a week later, a release that includes the Thus graphical installer. For Manjaro Linux Xfce 15.12, the developers will concentrate their efforts on replacing Thus with the awesome Calamares 2.0 graphical installer, which is currently in development too.

"With this release we have focused our efforts, bringing more attention to Calamares. Therefore, we used Calamares 2.0-Alpha1, which got released earlier today. It might still have some issues and caveats hidden. So be aware of that fact," says Philip Müller. "However, the install media is tested and installable in Virtualbox. Please feel free to test it also on real hardware on non-productive systems."

Calamares 2.0 brings LUKS encrypted Manjaro installations

New features in Manjaro Linux Xfce 15.12's Calamares graphical installer will include the ability to re-use each module in multiple instances of the installer by using different configurations, the addition of the kpmcore library as the default partitioning tool, support for encrypting installations with LUKS, as well as the addition of more distro-specific modules.

Courageous users who want to take this first Alpha build of the upcoming Manjaro Linux Xfce 15.12 operating system for a test drive, can download the Live DVD ISO images for 64-bit or 32-bit computers right now from Softpedia, but please be aware of the fact that it is a pre-release version, which means that it is not suitable for deployment on production systems.